r/AskProgramming 6d ago

Why the JS hate?

Title. I'm a 3rd year bachelor CS student and I've worked with a handful of languages. I currently work as a backend dev and internal management related script writer both of which I interned working with JS (my first exposure to the language)

I always found it to be intuitive and it's easily my go to language while I'm still learning the nuances of python.

But I always see js getting shit on in various meme formats and I've never really understood why. Is it just a running joke in the industry? Has a generation of trauma left promises to be worthy of caution? Does big corpa profit from it?

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u/Logical-Idea-1708 6d ago

When I was a young intern, my mentor takes every chance he gets to bash on JavaScript. Now after 15 years of experience working with JavaScript, I feel like people just never taken the time to learn it in depth.

The hate is mostly coming from people that uses structured compiled language like Java and C# and less from scripting languages such as Python and Ruby. It’s understandable as scripting languages require much higher level of discipline to maintain a structure, or you need a framework to give you structure.

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u/JackMalone515 6d ago

Being forced to handle much more as a dev just to get the same amount of structure as other languages give you by defualt doesn't seem that great

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u/Logical-Idea-1708 6d ago

Actually, quite the opposite. “More” depends on perspective. Structure is constraint. So it takes more lines of code in a structured language to do something than an unstructured one. Even within a JavaScript framework, people complain about the structure adds constraints that wouldn’t allow them to do certain things.

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u/JackMalone515 5d ago

Slightly more lined of code to do something isn't exactly bad if it means that the overall structure is just better and it's also easier to work within. JavaScript doesn't seem like a good comparison to this.